Ben Shapiro's novel True Allegiance faces severe criticism for its poor writing, factual errors, and reliance on right-wing tropes. Hosts highlight absurd plot points, including a Hispanic rancher mirroring Cliven Bundy, a SWAT member killing his own team via helicopter, and a gang leader murdering an eight-year-old boy to incite riots. The critique extends to stereotypical depictions of Muslims, such as "scraggly beards," and geographical ignorance regarding Iran and Tehran's culture. With scenes involving Molotov cocktails and testicle threats lacking realism, the hosts conclude that Shapiro's unedited manuscript demonstrates a profound lack of experience with violence and narrative coherence. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Behind The Bastards Intro00:14:08
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He thought up Willy Wonka and the BFG.
But did you know he was a spy?
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Was this before he wrote his stories?
It must have been.
What?
Okay, I don't think that's true.
I'm telling you, I was a spy.
Binge all 10 episodes of The Secret World of Roald Dahl now on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
How much do I want right now?
I'm about 130.
I'm at 183.
We should race.
No, I want to leave here with my original hip.
On the podcast, The Match Up with Aaliyah, I pair prominent female athletes with unexpected guests.
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We have our girl Hillary Duff in here, and we can't wait for you to hear this episode.
They put on Lizzie McGuire 2 a.m. video on demand this guy's 2 a.m. 2 a.m. whatever time it is.
Lizzie McGuire and I'm like wild bats you were waiting.
It was like a first like closet moment for me where I was like, you're like, I don't feel like she's hot like the rest of them.
No, no, no.
I was like, she's beautiful, but I'm appreciating her in a different way than these boys are.
I'm not like.
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What's increasingly emotionally shattered from the collapse of civilization and constant exposure to violence?
My.
Hi, this is Robert Evans.
I didn't quite bat.
But at least it was true.
Yeah.
Only.
So we've started.
We've started the show now.
Yeah, we only had to go to the starter and that is the beginning of the episode.
Chris, you could edit out that part where I said I cry all the time and just start with Robert's intro.
Also, listeners, I cry all the time.
Good stuff.
This is really bad.
I was going to say it's a really good start.
Oh, thanks, Katie.
It's vulnerable.
It's honest.
It's raw.
It's relatable.
I could go on.
Someone interrupt me.
It's a bit, it's like, it's got a little sardonic.
You got a little edge to it, a little bite, a little bite.
Podcast.
Yeah.
It feels like we started recording before we were ready, if I'm being aware of it.
We did.
We did.
But that's the first rule of broadcasting is to never be prepared or ready or competent.
Ever.
Never ever.
Check and check.
So this is Behind the Bastards.
It's normally a podcast about the worst people in all of history.
But, you know, sometimes we like to have a little bit of fun.
And this is going to be a fun one because we're diving back into Ben Shapiro's just unfathomably poorly written fiction novel, True Allegiance.
This will be episode three of our failure of pros.
I wish that our listeners could see the beatific smile that spread across Robert's face as he was talking about the fun we will have today.
Yeah.
We need this.
It's nice to see some joy through the screen.
That smile is me thinking about the time Ben Shapiro wrote in a character that was the captain of the high school football team and no one knew his name.
Nobody knew his name.
No one knew his name.
I mean, how could you?
How could you know the star football player's name?
Like at the back of his jersey?
I don't know.
Surely not that Ben.
Nothing like that.
Oh, God in heaven.
So you may want to watch the first listen to the first couple of episodes.
Podcast, Robert.
Your podcast, just as a reminder.
That's good to know.
I forget regularly because of all of the repeated exposure to police munitions.
I know.
Leah, when we left off, there was a fun moment where the character that Ben wrote in as the governor of Texas, whose name is Bubba.
Bubba, right?
Right, Bubba.
Yeah, was talking to the character who is clearly based on Ben Shapiro's own wife, who is the wife of the character that Ben wants to be, who is the bear of a man, combat general Brett Hawthorne.
And anyway, Ellen, his wife, and the governor were having a conversation about how bad it is to be a governor that the federal government refuses to support during a massive emergency that requires the mobilization of all resources.
And yeah, we were enjoying the irony of that of how Ben actually landed when such a thing happened for real.
And now we're going to move on to the next chapter, which is a chapter about Soledad, who, if you remember, is our, she's that rancher who's supposed to be Clivin Bundy.
Yes, yes, like 50 and Hispanic and a lady.
Yeah, really turning that stereotype on its heels.
Yeah.
Because you can't call her racist if he writes in a Hispanic character.
Then it's not racist.
Exactly.
Feminist, non-racist Ben Shapiro.
Yes.
He's got it.
Wait, what chapter are we on now?
Shit.
It's like seven or eight.
Okay.
Something like that.
Yeah.
We're several chapters in.
Too many chapters in.
Too many.
More than one.
More chapters than this book should have had because it should never have been written.
It should have stayed in Ben Shapiro's little head when he needed to feel like a big man.
He could think about the fake combat general that he invented to make himself feel tall.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And the short terrorists.
Yeah, and the short little, the terrorists who are all short.
Yes.
Yes.
Good people are tall.
Terrorists are short, except for bad black people who are all also very large.
That is the world that Ben Shapiro has created.
That is the cosmology of the moral universe in Ben Shapiro's head.
Sounds complicated, but really it's quite simple.
When you lay it out, yeah, really simple rules.
Yeah.
Okay, so it starts with Soledad waking up to a knock on her door at two in the morning.
And, you know, there's a Bundy type standoff going on at her ranch because she's not paying taxes because the taxes and all the evil government stuff makes it impossible for her ranch to actually work.
And anyway, there's this.
So there's a bunch of motorcycle gangsters and militia people calling themselves Soledad soldiers.
And they're all hanging out and guarding her house from the feds.
But they're starting soldier dads?
Oh, that would have been it.
That would have been it.
Ben.
Ben.
All right, it's time.
Yeah.
So, yeah, they've cut off her power.
And yeah, it's a bad situation for Soledad.
She says, oh, did we get a little bit of talk about some right-wing media folks here?
Yeah.
Even the occasional big media spread didn't seem to lift her too much anymore.
She felt like the whole game was rigged.
She was either hero or villain.
She was always the story.
Never Emilio and Juan.
It was always Chris Matthews on the nightly news calling her a traitor or Michael Savage calling her a freedom fighter.
It was always one or the other.
Yeah, I imagine Chris Matthews would declare, you didn't call Claven Bundy a traitor.
Who does he think Chris Matthews is?
He's getting confused.
Rampaging leftist Chris Matthews.
Is Ben Shapiro suggesting that there needs to be more nuance in how people are described?
I think so.
He calls so many people pure evil every day.
Yeah, well, and she's saying, you know, Soledad's angry.
Emilio and Juan, if you remember, she had to lay off her best worker and he moved to Los Angeles where his son was immediately killed in a gang and issues.
That's right.
Instantly.
Well, yeah, that's how it works.
Yeah, because Ben Shapiro understands the chunk of the city literally 30 to 45 minutes away from where he lives.
It's nuance, you guys.
An hour and a half in traffic.
Yeah.
Fucking great.
Write what you know.
Write what you know.
The chunk of the city you live in that you have never ever in your entire life visited because it scares you very much to think about.
Right, like the rule because the rule, write what you know.
Okay, well, I don't know any black people's names, so I can't name this.
I can't name it.
So I'm just going to say that no one knows his name.
Write what you know, not being able to call the black people in my life by their names because I never bother to learn them.
I do know that.
I will write about that.
Fucking Ben.
Awesome.
So Soledad's, you know, in this standoff with the government, and every day, like, the kind of militia that's that's arrayed to defend her peels away a little bit, you know, because people can't hang out all the time, but the SWAT team stays there.
And eventually, as things start to dwindle, she gets a knock on the door in the early morning.
And, quote, a SWAT officer stood there, his gun down by his side.
When she opened the screen door, he sidled in without permission, holding his right arm out, palm facing her, signaling for her to keep quiet.
He shut the door stealthily behind him.
Oh, God.
Oh, I love, yeah, because SWAT teams, they got all that stealth door closing training.
Like, unreal, like, just from, like, the reality of it, like, okay, Ben.
No, no, he didn't.
But also, like, what a poorly written sentence.
It's a terrible.
It's a terrible sentence.
It's good for like 10th grade.
Yeah, it's, it's.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, if this was a 10th grader, I would say what a precocious 10th grader who, you know, needs someone to sit down with him and tell him how to write well, but he's got, he's got the, he's got the spunk, you know?
He's got the spunk.
He's got the bad.
He's got the desire.
He's got the design.
He's getting it down on the page is half the battle.
The other half of the battle is knowing when not to publish something.
Still fighting that battle every day, huh?
Ben's lost that battle for a while.
I'm dying to know what he's there for.
Well, he places his weapon gently on the dining room table.
When he took off his helmet, she noticed his bright blue eyes.
They stood out more because they were.
They stood out more because they were red-rimmed, whether from lack of sleep or from crying.
She couldn't tell.
The man stood no more than 5'10.
Well built, Caucasian.
A thatch of must-brown hair stood neatly on end.
He moved forward quickly and grabbed her by the arm.
She could feel his powerful grip through her thick robe.
Why would you do that?
That's a weird.
That's not how you.
Okay, you need to get out of here, he growled.
Now he growled quietly.
He growled quietly and gently, like a bear.
Like a shadowy bread.
She pushed his hand off her arm.
She pushed his hand off her arm, stood up to her full five foot two.
Ben is just obsessed with people's heights.
I'm not going anywhere.
Wait, wait, did he wait, did he just say five foot two?
He sure did.
Wait, wait, that was five foot two.
No.
Who cares?
What?
Asn't it?
I thought it was 5'10.
And what?
No, no, no.
He's 5'10.
She's 5'2 ⁇ .
Oh, okay.
So we know that there's like a sizable difference between them.
That's why it's important.
Great story, Ben.
Like, she's been a character in this book already.
Why is he like this?
Like, after multiple appearances, by the way, she's 5'2 ⁇ .
What a bad writer.
What a bad writer.
So she's like, I'm not going to go anywhere.
And he's like, I don't think you understand, Mr. Mirez.
They're coming for you tonight.
So this is the good SWAT team guy, the decent cop who's like, I've got to warn her.
The feds are coming in to murder this brave patriot.
She looked at the SWAT member, puzzled.
Why are you helping me?
My cookies can't be that good.
He laughed softly.
Maybe they are.
A pause.
Or maybe I'm just sick of watching people get pushed around.
Whatever it is.
You need to get out of here tonight.
I thought that was masterful.
So we learn his name is Aiden Foster.
What a strong name.
And she tells Aiden, You ready to be a traitor, Aiden?
He shrugged.
She walked over to one of the cabinets, opened it, took out a jar.
Well, we might as well split a cookie on that.
Aiden Foster And Helicopters00:10:19
God damn it.
Oh, my God.
I fucking hate Ben Shapiro so much.
Oh, such bad writing.
Unbelievable.
We might as well scare a cookie.
Oh, God damn it, Ben.
It's, yeah.
So, okay.
They do the cookie bit for a little while.
They do the cookie bit for a little while.
They're trying to get away.
Like some really natural interactions, like human beings do.
Oh, Jesus.
So their attempted escape seems like a horrible idea.
Immediately, she loads some stuff up in a backpack and heads out with this SWAT team guy.
And one of his team members sees that they're doing this.
And so Aiden throws a smoke grenade and then starts firing wildly, is how Ben describes it.
Oh, my God.
Too high to hit anyone.
He heard at least two men curse and scatter.
In the distance, he could see the lights of the choppers flash on.
He dropped.
By the way, we've just switched to Aiden Foster's viewpoint from Soledad's viewpoint because Ben does that in the middle of chapters that are supposed to be viewpoint chapters from characters because he's a good writer.
Does he?
Okay, my gosh.
Okay.
Does he at least, at least, is it like there's a page break and some asterisks?
No, it's really jarring and weird and bad.
Wait, it's literally like the next paragraph is just now we're in Aiden's point of view.
Yeah, yeah, that's that's that's that's how it feels.
Uh, yeah, that's definitely how it feels because we can't be, it's an action time, right?
They're having a gunfight and we can't we can't be in a woman's perspective during a gunfight.
Of course not.
Yeah.
That's so awkward and weird.
That sounds like something that he maybe didn't even notice he was doing, probably for the exact reason that you just said.
Yeah, his subconscious kicks in and he immediately changes the perspective.
Right.
It's like, well, surely she can't describe it.
Yeah.
And it's okay.
I hope I find it.
Well, I guess I find it disappointing that when he said that he was shooting too high for it to hit anything, that he didn't say how many feet and inches it was.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, of course not.
That would have been good to know.
We always need to know the exact.
Is that higher than everybody?
Come on.
Be consistent.
It is cool that one of Solida, or yeah, somebody yells at the cops, go to hell, you fascist assholes.
That's fun.
Okay.
Yeah.
So a big, you know, and now a fight starts with her militia and all the cops.
And Aiden Foster tries to get her, you know, tells her, ma'am, I recommend we get out of here.
Sniper bullets zing around them.
We get another moment where we learn again, yet again, that Ben does not understand anything about firearms because he refers to the rounds being shot at them as heavy caliber 7.62 millimeter rounds, which I assume means he's referring to like 762 by 51 NATO, which is essentially 308, which is a sizable bullet, but is also legally a handgun round.
So that's fun.
Take your word for it.
I mean, yeah, what an idiot, Ben.
Yeah, you're wrong on guns.
I know.
Totally.
I was going to say, I was going to say that.
Yeah, it's silly.
It's just.
Well, he's also the guy who, whenever guns are brought up, it's like, libs don't understand guns.
They don't even know what they mean when they talk about it.
It's like, well, Ben.
It's not a heavy caliber.
It's a normal caliber.
It's like a full-size rifle caliber, but it's anyway, whatever.
Fucking, I'm splitting hairs now, but I know it matters to Ben that he be seen as understanding guns.
It matters to him that you know that he's wrong about this.
Yes, yes, yes, it does.
So, okay.
Do you have a plan?
She yelled at Foster above the ear-splitting whine of the bullets.
Hell no, he said, but I'll bet they do.
In the distance, the cavalry was coming.
Sola dad soldiers, at least a dozen bearded, gun-toting men on their steel horses, riding directly towards the SWAT lines.
She could see it in the distance.
Pickett's hog charge.
Comparing them to Confederate cavalry.
That's fun.
Yeah.
The good guys here.
My head's going to fucking explode.
Oh, boy.
So the SWAT happened.
Formed up and turned to face them.
Guns at the ready, which is when the chopper began to groan.
It sputtered, crackled, and then dropped to the ground right at the SWAT lines.
It spiraled out of control, scattering the SWAT.
I don't know because Ben is a terrible fucking writer.
Wait, so the helicopter crashed?
Yeah, it sure does.
Yeah, it kills all the SWAT guys.
They're crying for their mothers.
Ben writes that in.
Solid adds horrified as they burn to death.
Wait, what?
This is so weird.
What?
They get out of there because the chopper randomly falls out of the sky and kills all the SWAT team members.
No, no, it turns out I think what happens is Aiden Foster, the SWAT team member who just couldn't see her get killed, shot the helicopter out of the air.
Still.
And killed his own men.
Wait, so he switches, he switches the narrative to talk from Aiden's point of view.
Yeah.
But cannot describe Aiden doing that to the helicopter.
No, of course not.
Okay.
No, we're left to piece that together after it gets shot out of the sky.
Because if he didn't do that, and if we were, if it was Soledad describing the thing, it would make sense that she doesn't know what's happening.
Oh, no, the helicopter fell out.
Yeah, and then she looks back and she sees him with, you know, smoke curling out of the barrel of his rifle and tears in his eyes, you know.
But no, because Ben is, again, very bad at writing.
Well, I think what's clear to me, I'm probably, I'm sure I've said this at other times.
He's just so clearly writing something that he wants to have made into a movie.
Like, he's not even thinking about this as a book.
He's like, oh, this will look tight.
Yeah.
Yeah, and there's no way to embarrass something.
The hardest thing when you're writing fiction like this is maintaining an understanding of space, of geography, of where things are and making it clear to the reader where things are, especially in an action scene like that.
It's hard to do.
And Ben doesn't even really try.
Like, we have no idea as these bikers are rushing towards these SWAT lines.
We have no clear idea where the SWAT lines are, what they look like.
You know, are there fortifications?
What direction are these guys coming from?
Where were they before that allows them to be like charging at the SWAT team?
Like, no attempt is made to make that clear.
Just like no attempt is made to let us know what has actually happened to the helicopter because Ben is a terrible writer.
Yeah, or why nobody knows that kid's name.
Yeah.
It's all like, it's all like weird, like his idea of what tropes are.
Like, they're not even like tropes necessarily.
It's like, oh, and then he says, like, they do like a cookie bit, right?
Yeah.
These people do the cookie stuff.
Yeah.
I do want to see this movie, though.
Yep.
Yep.
So, yeah, Aiden Foster bodily picked her up and put her on a motorcycle behind one of the militiamen.
She clung to his leather jacket as he twisted.
Again, wait a minute.
Where did he get a leather jacket?
There's a SWAT guy.
What?
Yeah, okay.
So basically, what happens is there's a gunfight going on now.
A bunch of the SWAT guys are dead, and now the militiamen are having a gunfight with the surviving SWAT guys.
And Aiden Foster, you know, it puts her on the puts her on the back of a motorcycle to be spirited away to safety.
And just to give you an idea of how badly this paragraph is written, we start first sentence of the paragraph.
Foster bodily picked her up and put her on a motorcycle behind one of the militiamen.
She clung to his leather jacket as he twisted the throttle and peeled out, spinning it like.
Oh, so it's a militiaman's leather jacket.
It's the militia man who is the second he in this after we start.
That's a really bad sentence.
Oh.
Oh, wow, that was so unclear.
Even because he's a bad writer.
He's a bad writer.
I'm a terrible, terrible writer.
Oh, when you said bodily, is it bodily, like B-O-D-I-L-Y, or like bodily?
Is that even a word?
B-O-D-I-L-Y.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He bodily picked her up as if there's another way to pick someone up.
Say he picked her up.
God.
How else would you pick someone up but bodily?
Like, cut like 30% of the words you're using.
Could you pick, maybe you just pick them up by the ankle and lift their whole body, but just by the ankle?
And so then you're ankly picking them up?
I don't know.
He used his hands to bodily pick her up against gravity's will.
God damn it, Ben Shapiro.
You are horrible at the thing that clearly matters more to you than anything else.
Anything else?
Yeah.
Oh, good God.
Yeah, so the last paragraph of this terrible chapter.
Don't look back, Soledad whispered to herself.
Don't look back.
But she did, just long enough to see in the distance, some of the flaming men go out, leaving nothing but smoking chars of flesh.
Horrible sentence.
Horrible sentence.
But she did comma just long enough to see, comma, in the distance, comma, some of the flaming men go out, comma, leaving nothing but smoking showers of flesh.
You made up that many commas.
You made up that punctuation.
I fucking did not.
That is how Ben that is Ben Shapiro constructing a sentence.
I don't think he has any, like, he writes sentences as if he's only heard of grammar by it being like described to him by a witch doctor around a fucking fire.
Like, it's he obviously doesn't have an editor.
Ben Shapiro Sentence Construction00:03:49
He like read it.
He like read a Chuck Pollock book and he's like, wow, all of Chuck's sentences are like three words long and they're all these periods.
Oh my God.
Hey, do you want to know who does have an editor?
This podcast, and it's time to do an ad break.
I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable until I really started making money.
It's Financial Literacy Month and the podcast Eating While Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
If I'm outside with my parents and they see all these people come up to me for pictures, it's like, what?
Today now, obviously, it's like 100%.
They believe everything, but at first it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
And what I mean by fail is they don't have money to pay for food.
They cannot feed their kids.
They do not have homes.
Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
Listen to Eating Wild Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
When you listen to podcasts about AI and tech and the future of humanity, the hosts always act like they know what they're talking about and they are experts at everything.
Here, the Nick Dick and Pole Show, we're not afraid to make mistakes.
What Kugler did that I think was so unique, he's the writer director.
Who do you think he is?
I don't know.
You meet the like the president?
You think he was the president?
You think Canada has a president?
You think China has a president?
Lozla cruzette.
God, I love that thing.
I use it all the time.
I wrap it in a blanket and sing to it.
It's like the old Polish saying, not my monkeys, not my circus.
Yep.
It was a good one.
I like that saying.
It's an actual Polish saying.
That is an actual Polish saying.
Better version of play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Yes.
Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
I actually, I thought it was.
I got that wrong.
Listen to the Nick Dick and Poll Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic: Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.
I'm talking to leaders from the entertainment industry to finance and everywhere in between.
This season on Math and Magic, I'm talking to CEO of Liquid Death, Mike Cesario, financier and public health advocate, Mike Milken, take-to interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick.
If you're unable to take meaningful creative risk and therefore run the risk of making horrible creative mistakes, then you can't play in this business.
Sesame Street CEO Sherry Weston and our own chief business officer, Lisa Coffey.
Making consumers see the value of the human voice and to have that guaranteed human promise behind it really makes it rise to the top.
Listen to Math and Magic, stories from the frontiers of marketing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
On a recent episode of the podcast Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Bajanista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never ever taught.
Financial education is not always about like, I'm going to get rich.
Police Procedure And Racial Tension00:15:29
That's great.
It's about creating an atmosphere for you to be able to take care of yourself and leave a strong financial legacy for your family.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the Idheart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
We're back.
Every time we do one of these Ben Shapiro episodes, I'm nervous at the start that I'll just be like reading you guys a chapter and nothing entertaining will happen.
And every time I am immediately reminded, no, Ben is just bad enough that this will never not be fun to do.
Oh, absolutely.
100%.
There's always some sort of a treasure buried in here.
Yeah.
Not even buried, just sitting on the surface.
It's like, it's like a trick.
It's like trying to, you're trying to clean a pool with one of those little scoopers, but it's just like, oh, there's gold everywhere.
So our next chapter, oh, everyone's going to be excited about this.
We're back with Levon, our gang leader who's friends with obviously an Al Sharpton insertion and who, if you'll remember last time, paid a black child to get murdered by a cop because that's the only way such a situation will ever occur.
That's so bad happens.
Good God.
Just like.
The nature of his racism is so much more offensive to me.
And obviously, I'm a white guy, but it's so much more offensive to me than like an actual straight-up Klans member.
Because at least that guy really knows he's a racist.
Whereas Ben Shapiro is certain that he is doing the opposite of racism while being shockingly racist.
It's so, it's so fascinating and frustrating to watch every sentence.
It's like, how do you not, I mean, you know, he knows.
At some level, he knows.
Yeah.
Levon felt the air around him crackle with energy.
It was something he had felt before, just before a fight.
The switch that went off in the brain that notched the senses higher made them more sensitive.
Ben.
Oh, my God.
Making a number of things clear.
I'm sorry.
Senses and sensitive can't be right there in the same sentence.
No, they should.
He said before twice within like five words.
He absolutely did.
It's a terrible sentence and also clear evidence that Ben has never in his life been in a fight.
Yeah.
Oh, God.
Okay.
So here, the switch that went off in the brain that notched the senses higher made them more sensitive.
Next sentence.
The adrenaline flowing through the veins.
That's the whole sentence.
The adrenaline flowing through the veins.
Not a sentence, Ben.
It's just the narrator in Fight Club doing his little like half sentences because like that's the style we're doing.
God.
Yeah.
The feeling that you'd burst from the inside out if the fight didn't commence and write quick.
God.
He's making it sound very animalistic, isn't he?
Oh.
Yeah.
Oh my God.
I wanted to write all books.
Yeah.
God damn it.
He's so mad at everything.
He can't do anything.
It's just remarkable.
Yeah.
What the fuck?
Okay.
So this felt like those fights multiplied exponentially.
That's because Levon knew he wasn't alone this time.
That wasn't multiplied.
Multiplied exponentially.
But anywhere expensive.
It's so dense.
Like there's so many layers to the shittiness of this.
Right, I don't want to parse every single five-word phrase, but my God.
But by God, we have to.
We just have to.
That's because Levon knew that he wasn't alone this time.
It wasn't him taking on some gang rival or him debating some white Republican club sucker at the U.
Yeah.
Fucking Ben.
This is going to be flames and blood and struggle in power.
This was going to be death and mayhem and hope and glory.
This was going to be fucking big.
All Levon needed was the cue.
He'd discuss the cue ahead of time with the Reverend.
It would come on television during a press conference Big Jim planned to hold with the mayor in the aftermath of the Kendrick Malone killing.
The killing of another.
It's bad.
It's real bad.
Yeah.
The killing of another young, innocent black man at the hands of the racist white establishment.
The police targeting a kid, an unarmed kid for God's sake, just because he happened to be black and happened to be out at night at the wrong time.
The shooting had worked out precisely according to the plan.
Levon had one of his boys give little Kendrick a $20 bill to go and harass the cop.
Kendrick, of course, thought it was just a piece of good, clean fun.
Messing with white cops was a rare joy, made you feel like more of a man.
And with all the big boys telling him how he'd be a boss in the neighborhood if he baited the cop, he'd been enthusiastic.
He probably looked forward to coming home and telling his buddies how he told that cracker ass pig to go to hell, stared right at him and cursed him to his face, made the pig back down.
Kendrick knew he was supposed to go for his toy gun.
They told him it would be a joke, that the cop wouldn't do anything, that the cop would pussy out.
Of course, Levon knew better.
No cop could sit still when somebody went for the waistband.
Police procedure dictated what happened next.
Ben, you almost got something there.
You almost realized something there.
He got a little too close and then backed away from it.
Maybe a system in which the only possible response to a child pulling out a toy gun is murder has some problems.
Well, what I hate about this is that he is not aware of it.
He's like getting so close and he just he thinks it's okay for a cop to pull out their gun in this situation is essentially what he's saying.
Like we're tricking the cops into pulling their guns.
No, they did it.
They did the thing that they shouldn't do.
Yeah.
No, it's just like the his the we talked about the last time I think it's like the conspiracy aspect of this is just so uh bizarre and like weirdly insulting.
Like you could you could yeah a competent writer trying to have something similar happen, you know, have a have a have a black gang leader who attempts to use this as the cue to spark an uprising.
You could just have them try to make use of a normal police killing.
Just have it happen.
Just have it happen.
Have a thing happen that happens all the time.
Have it be just a normal tragedy that then a person takes advantage of.
Right.
Like that's like that's closer to like what how Ben views everything anyway.
So like why manufacture this weird like everybody's there's a conspiracy.
Ben is such a bad writer that he can't even effectively advance his own bullshit narratives because of his incompetence.
Well, right.
Because, like, that's actually like an interesting, like, that would be baseline interesting in terms of like art or like a novel.
Like, oh, wow, they're using this thing to do this thing.
I disagree with this, but like, this thing is an actual conflict there.
Yeah, you could have like a black special forces veteran turned gang leader who's like, has developed this deep hatred for the American Empire due to having his friends die and the PTSD he's accrued.
And, you know, he's trained in actually setting up an insurgency.
And then there's a murder by a police officer of a black kid, and he uses it as an opportunity to, you know, set something into motion that will destroy this empire.
And then you have an interesting character and you have an interesting situation, and you can like you can actually have a story.
Right.
People are engaged in, like, actually struggle with, because like some sort of like gray area and like the morality and ethics are like yeah, in conflict with each other.
But he's just like well, what if?
Like, he's just like, go fuck, like evil.
He's evil yeah, what if he's evil and he pays the people to die?
He paid the boy to die because a because a an eight or nine year old black boy living in the inner city uh, wouldn't know that pulling a toy gun on a cop would very easily lead to his death.
Wouldn't know the thing that literally every black boy in the entire nation knows, literally it happened.
Like, didn't this book come out in like 2016?
Yes yes, it did, Cody.
Like it's.
Oh, my god man oh, it's amazing.
So, and of course, because everything has to be ridiculously contrived, Levon didn't just set up the boy encountering the cop.
He destroyed all of the other cameras, but one in the neighborhood that had the right angle for the, the shot he wanted to have played on.
Uh uh, nightly tv um, one angle, one tape, one million replays on Nightly NEWS.
The headline writers couldn't help themselves.
Eight-year-old, unarmed black boy shot dead by white cop.
Blared the FREE Press murderer, screamed the headline on the NEW YORK Daily NEWS.
Yes um, Ben knows how headlines is written.
Yeah well, the phrase one million replays on the Nightly NEWS isn't a thing.
Those words don't go together.
You know, Cody?
It's absolutely not a thing.
That's not how the Nightly NEWS works.
One million replays on Nightly NEWS is not a sentence.
But I I think what we're all getting is that literally the only thing that Ben Shapiro understands is being Ben Shapiro, a boy who was plucked out by right-wing billionaires to write nonsense on the internet when he was a child um, and only understands writing right-wing nonsense for the internet and getting paid millions of dollars.
Yes yeah uh right, it was, it's that.
And the combination of wanting to be like a tv writer um, and not doing that, and so, because he's bad at it, he's bad at everything.
I just thought of all of his like super fanboys that have read his books and they're like, have you read Shapiro's book?
It's so good.
Oh, i'm a total screw head.
I, I don't.
I don't think a single person has had that experience.
I don't even think these Ben Shapiro fans could possibly enjoy this fucking book.
It's so bad.
Yeah.
So Robert hastily read the words with his eyes.
And then ocularly.
Ocularly.
He looked at them.
CNN headlined the case the entire day and the next one as well over on MSNBC.
The talking heads could barely conceal their excitement on Fox News.
A few anchors urged caution while others talked of the legacy of racist policing across the country.
The president obviously has to get involved in this and he tells Americans the time has come for a great racial conversation in this country.
Too many black boys have been murdered merely for the color of their skin.
This must end.
Which is obviously a bad thing to do.
Controversial.
Oh, clearly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, you know, the president, Obama doesn't know that the kid was paid money to die.
No, of course not.
It's not his fault.
So yeah, Levon is now waiting outside the Coleman A. Young Municipal Center, named after the former mayor of the city, a man who'd been a racial pro in his own right.
Don't know what that means.
What does that mean?
You don't know what a racial pro is.
You didn't abbreviate that on your end.
It's written out.
That's how that's written in the fucking book.
Oh, boy, howdy.
Good guy.
What does it mean?
So Levon says old Coleman's going to make one more sacrifice in the name of racial justice if all goes according to plan.
Yeah.
Boy howdy.
So they're in front of the Spirit of Detroit statue, which Levon describes as looking like a constipated Nordic man.
Yeah.
Behind Levon stood a solid 3,000 of his fellow Detroiters, mostly young black men.
Levon had sent out his boys to round up the crowd, and they'd had an easy time of it after the media coverage.
Facing the crowd, protecting the statue in a platform set up just before it stood about 100 cops.
Levon noticed a particular lack of weapons.
He smiled to himself.
Ben really understands how cops work.
Yeah.
The unarmed cops showing up to this event.
Yeah, yeah.
I was just last night, 200 people surrounded or not surrounded hung out outside of Portland police union headquarters.
And yeah, they had a ton of weapons and used them on us because that's what cops do to crowds.
Ah, yes.
Ah, yes.
Yeah.
I like, I don't know, the first thing I thought when you said you referenced calling his boys.
I mean, just Ben's never had boys to call.
No.
That's so bad.
He wishes he has a group of boys he could call.
He would love to.
He would love to.
But unfortunately, Ben Shapiro is incapable of doing anything but writing garbage for the internet.
Ben's boys are Dennis Prager.
That's who Ben's calling up.
Yeah.
So, yeah.
So Levon smiles when he notices how unarmed the cops are.
There's media all over the place interviewing the odd protester here.
Yeah.
The crowd's going to beat up a lot of people, including when he smiled.
Did it say he smiled quite happily?
Lippily.
Lipwardsly smiled.
He smiled mouthily.
Yeah.
Smiling from his lips.
Yeah, so he says that a couple of reporters getting caught in the melee is just how it's going to have to be.
If they were too well-behaved, the media would dismiss them.
A bit of blood got them hot under the collar.
A bit of blood made the story hot.
The way the media worked, the only way they'd pay attention was if somebody did something extreme.
Then they defend the action, blame it on the overriding anger at an unfair society.
I have to diagram the sentence out.
This is a sentence.
Please, you lost me a little.
I am reading a sentence to you.
One sentence.
Right.
Sometimes it's like, is this one sentence?
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
The way the media worked, comma, the only way they'd pay attention was if somebody did something extreme, dash, and then they'd defend the action, comma, blame it on overriding anger at an unfair society.
Period.
Okay, thank you for doing that.
Oh, my God.
That's a sentence that Ben wrote.
Yeah.
Thinking that's a sentence.
This is a real illuminating look into how he views the current moment in time.
Ben is an editor for a bad editor.
He's just a lucky person.
Oh, my God.
Like, who paid for this book to be written down and then sold?
Incredible.
Justice Chant And Burning Men00:05:30
Yeah.
So Levon had his men ringing the edges of the crowd, ready to prevent any non-approved persons from getting too close to the media members.
No footage of fools, he'd promised the Reverend.
And he intended to keep his word.
Tonight, Levon intended to be the face on the news.
Already, he'd done his best Malcolm X impression.
Early Malcolm, not that late stage Islam means peace pussy shit for the networks.
If we don't get what we want, he said, if we don't get justice for Kendrick, this city is going to burn.
We've been burning silently for too long.
Our poverty burns beneath the surface.
Our ignorance burns beneath the surface.
We've been left for dead in this city, just like black boys have been left for dead all over this country.
And this country must pay a price if there is no justice.
Ben Shapiro.
Oh, my God.
Yeah.
Sorry.
Oh, God.
Okay.
I know it's going to get worse.
So the last thing that Levon says, we're just left to assume he's talking to the media now because Ben doesn't actually make that clear here.
But we can put that together by context clothes.
Yes.
Yeah.
So that sentence is.
And the country must pay a price if there is no justice.
End of Levon's sentence.
Next paragraph.
The sexy blonde with the short skirt seemed turned on at that point.
First, we're hearing of her.
Breathily.
The sexy blonde.
What?
Yeah.
Breathily, she asked.
I hate it.
I hate it.
Oh, you're so bad at writing.
And what will justice look like?
So he threw in a line.
That's just the next sentence.
So he threw in a line just for good measure.
Justice will be done when people like you live in the mud you've made for us.
Only then can we lift each other up.
Her eyelashes fluttered.
That shit was magic, Levon knew.
He'd learned it at the university, too.
White co-eds majoring in journalism were a cinch.
Just drag them off their civilized perch and let them experience life outside their self-proclaimed white privilege.
And they let you know that you'd be doing them a favor.
This is so amazing.
It's so horrifying.
Yeah.
It's you can't even begin to unpack how bad that is.
The writing is awful.
What it says about him, awful.
Every other sentence in this is so fascinating on so many levels.
And like, I just want to give it to like, has his wife read this?
Like, do people in his life know like his wife?
His wife didn't read this.
No, she definitely didn't.
She's a doctor.
She has things to do.
Yeah, she doesn't have time.
Yeah, exactly.
I think it's very clear that Ben's editor didn't have time to read this.
No, no, he's got other stuff to do.
Yeah, we are the first people to read this.
So the mayor shows up at the Nordic man's statue to address the crowd.
Wait, sorry, real quick.
You're saying it's his part of the chapter, right?
It's not his chapter.
It's his chapter.
It's his chapter.
It is.
Okay, so it's not a bouncy thing.
It might.
Who knows?
That could have the next paragraph.
This is a Ben Shapiro book.
Yeah.
So we meet the mayor.
Mayor comes up.
He got his job after the last guy went to jail for being corrupt.
Yeah, yeah.
Now he wiped his pasty white forehead with a handkerchief.
He adjusted his glasses.
He looked down at his notes.
I, his voice broke.
I have just met with area leaders as well as civil rights leaders across the country.
Why is the mayor meeting with them across the anyway?
And I can say to all of you that our investigation will be full and fair and that justice will be done.
What justice?
Levon shouted at the top of his lungs.
The shout rang out like a gun report in the cold night air.
Justice will be done, the mayor continued.
Officer Ricky O'Sullivan has been suspended from duty pending a full investigation.
This deeply troubling incident has stirred the conscience of Americans from border to border.
But I promise you, justice will not rest until the tragedy of Kendrick Malone.
What justice?
What justice?
Levon was chanting now at the top of his lungs.
A few scattered voices joined in.
Mayor Burns, momentarily flustered, clutched at the pages of his prepared remarks.
The voices grew, pounding, angry, steady.
What justice?
Trying to be heard over the chant, also terrible chant.
Trying to be heard over the chant, the mayor continued now.
Reverend Crawford began nodding softly.
Until the tragedy of Kendrick Malone is answered for with truth, we must uncover all the facts.
Burns suddenly stumbled backwards as a rock struck him in the scalp.
Almost in slow motion, his arm.
Yes.
Scalp was a weird choice.
Hit on the head.
Yeah.
Yeah, in a scalp.
No, in a scalp.
And almost in slow motion, his arms stretched for air, circling in a nearly comic pinwheel.
He teetered on his heels just a minute.
He almost did a few things.
He almost did a number of things.
Yeah, so he falls.
And Ben lets us know that he has a large butt and he falls on it.
And then, yeah, a bunch of people, the whole crowd starts throwing shit.
Molotov cocktails start being tossed.
Sail over the smash into the statue and get on the cops.
People get lit on fire.
The cops shoot tear gas everywhere.
Yeah, now we have a big old riot.
This is not the first time he's described people being burned alive.
Yeah, right.
The thing he thinks about people, a bunch of people are burning alive at the end of that.
It's the most violent thing he has in this chapter.
College Riot And Crowd Psychology00:04:39
Yeah.
Because he hasn't ever seen violence.
Right.
He's like, it's got to go.
It's got to go wild.
They're all on fire.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, yeah, things start to go crazy.
Random gunshots in the crowd.
Media members jabbering madly into their microphones.
Ducking playing war correspondent.
And then Reverend Jim Crawford standing tall and proud in his immaculately tailored suit.
So the fucking Al Sharpton guy gets up and yells at everybody to stop.
And the street, the whole street goes quiet and the riot stops.
And that's apparently the moment that Levon engineered, was starting a riot that would then be stopped instantly by this reverend because everybody at the riot knew to take this one man's cue to stop rioting when they started rioting.
Because that's the way riots work.
That's how things work.
Ben has been to riots, guys.
He understands crowd psychology.
He went to college.
He did go to a college.
He did attend.
You know who else went to college?
Ads.
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I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable until I really start making money.
It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating Wall Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
If I'm outside with my parents and they see all these people come up to me for pictures, it's like, what?
Today now, obviously, it's like 100% they believe everything, but at first it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
And what I mean by fail is they don't have money to pay for food.
They cannot feed their kids.
They do not have homes.
Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
Listen to Eating Wild Brook from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
When you listen to podcasts about AI and tech and the future of humanity, the hosts always act like they know what they're talking about and they are experts at everything.
Here at the Nick Dick and Pole Show, we're not afraid to make mistakes.
What Koogler did that I think was so unique, he's the writer director.
Who do you think he is?
I don't know.
You meet the like the president?
You think he goes to president?
You think Canada has a president?
You think China has a president?
Lesla Cruzette.
God, I love that thing.
I use it all the time.
I wrap it in a blanket and sing to it.
It's like the old Polish saying, not my monkeys, not my circus.
Yep.
It was a good one.
I like that saying.
It's an actual Polish saying, it is an actual Polish saying.
Better version of Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes.
Yes.
Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
I actually, I thought it was.
I got that wrong.
Listen to the Nick Dick and Pole Show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic, Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.
I'm talking to leaders from the entertainment industry to finance and everywhere in between.
This season on Math and Magic, I'm talking to CEO of Liquid Death, Mike Cesario, financier and public health advocate Mike Milken, take-to interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick.
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Sesame Street CEO Sherry Weston and our own chief business officer, Lisa Coffey.
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Listen to Math and Magic, stories from the frontiers of marketing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Bajanista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never, ever taught.
Financial education is not always about like, I'm going to get rich.
Scraggly Beards And Evil Talk00:15:22
That's great.
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If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
We are back.
We have returned.
Oh, good God.
We have returned Returnally.
That was wonderful.
We returned mentally.
They have come back.
We're in Tehran, Iran.
America has fallen.
The transformation from Dar al-Harb to Dar al-Islam has begun.
Muhammad watched, transfixed.
Already.
Sorry, go ahead.
Okay.
Ibrahim Ashami's eyes glowed brightly, as they always did when he was excited.
What?
It's literally, he's just describing Emperor Palpatine.
What?
Glowing yellow, his snakey eyes.
It was a peculiar quality that attracted many of his followers.
They saw in that glow a fiery hope, warm and consuming, hope for a better world.
The teacher, they said, brought hope.
That's good, Ben.
He brought hope.
They brought a fiery hope.
The teacher brought hope.
Thank you for telling us that three times a different way.
Oh my God, we're going to say that again.
I thought you were repeating yourself.
No, no, no.
They saw in that glow a fiery hope, warm and consuming.
New sentence, hope for a new world.
New sentence, the teacher, they said, brought hope.
Oh, oh, oh, that last one really made me.
Oh, I.
It's bad.
You know, he's probably like, this is good.
This is good.
You insert as many hopes as possible.
You have to really, that's good writing.
Really?
People love it when you repeat the same very basic point three times in the space of two sentences.
Man, that second one wasn't like egregious.
Like, okay, you're like, yeah, you're being repetitive.
It's not great, but it's not like.
Well, you know, Ben is a scholar of literature, and I think, you know, he's a big fan.
You all know that famous Ernest Hemingway short story.
For sale, baby shoes never worn because the baby's dead.
The baby didn't get a chance to wear the shoes.
The baby never wore the shoes that were bought for it.
That one.
Yeah.
The perfect story.
Brevity is the soul of, I don't know, talking too much or whatever.
Okay.
So here's, I assume, I assume this is the teacher talking.
Ben just jumps right into the quotations, and we're kind of left to figure out that it's the teacher talking, but he doesn't say the teacher.
Anyway, it's bad writing again.
Today's attack has ensured that the crippled and weakened infidel giant that was the United States will never rise again.
That's one sentence.
The emptiness and degradation of that perverse country has been wiped away and the glorious reign of Allah has begun.
Another sentence.
Those that rejected Allah followed vanities and Allah has destroyed them.
Today, America has seen that those who reject Allah and hinder men from the path of Allah, their deeds will Allah render astray.
God damn it, Ben.
That's a sentence.
Today, comma, America has seen that those who reject Allah and hinder men from the path of Allah, dash, their deeds will Allah render astray.
That's a sentence, Ben, right?
No, it's not.
Is it though?
Is it a sentence?
It is not a sentence, Katie.
Thank you for asking.
Unreal.
What do these fucking people have to do with this?
Hey, Ben, here's a thing that you might do as a writer writing about, you know, an Islamic extremist emir preaching.
Listen to a single speech by one of these guys, of which there are thousands on the internet, to understand how they actually talk.
Or just take from one of them.
Take from alter it a little bit.
Sometimes that, like, writers can do that, Ben.
But no.
He's got a pretty good handle on how Islamic extremists talk.
Yes.
Okay, so, yeah, this goes on for a little while.
Oh my God.
A drop of sweat rolled down Ashami's craggy face and embedded itself in his scraggly beard.
Ashami had lost weight in his three years in the mountains of Tora Bora, but he was finally putting it back on now that he was ensconced in his complex in Tehran.
The government had granted it to him out of gratitude for his prior efforts against the great Satan with a yearly stipend that enabled him to live comfortably, which is funny because of the whole Iran was fighting against Islamic militia.
Anyway, whatever, whatever, whatever.
The actual history of Iran in Afghanistan does not matter at all because Ben doesn't know it.
There are so many things that have been offensive in these few brief chapters.
And this is just so offensive to be writing about something that he knows nothing about.
Not a single solitary goddamn thing about it.
It's so grotesque.
Yeah.
No funny jokes here.
Just he does some evil Muslim talking.
And well, actually, no, we just continue to describe his fucking room and shit.
And it's bad.
I just can't stand the adjectives.
I can't.
No, they're horrible.
They're horrible.
Like the watery sweat drip down his craggy face into his scraggly beard and his pointed chin.
Just like just, oh, whatever.
It doesn't matter.
Who cares?
Yeah.
Ashami pointed at the camera.
Muhammad, his youngest recruit, an attractive boy of 17, struggling to grow a scraggly beard.
Only way Ben knows how to describe a Muslim beard.
Have you seen any of these guys?
They're not scraggly beards.
They have really fucking big beards, Ben.
It's kind of the thing.
Oh, my God.
Also, like, he really wanted to grow a scraggly beard.
That's the goal.
No, he's a fucking little kid.
He wants to grow a beard.
Any beard.
Any beard.
And he's an Islamic extremist, which means he wants one of those big full beards that they put like fucking orange dye in because that's what they fucking do.
There's a million pictures of these guys.
Scraggly isn't something he would, the kid would think.
Yeah.
It's what Ben thinks of their beards.
Yeah, because a full beard is something Ben considers manly and is probably angry that he cannot grow himself.
And so Islamic extremists have to have scraggly beards like the ones that Ben grows.
That's my theory.
That's it.
Well, like, I mean, it's that a lot of it comes down to that one tweet of his, right?
Israelis like to build stuff.
Arabs like to live in sewage and bomb crap.
He thinks they all live in dirt, so they look like dirt, and they have scraggly beards because that means they live in dirt.
They can't even get beards right.
These muscles.
They can't get beards right.
They're primitive fire.
Yeah.
It's amazing.
Okay, so he talks to Muhammad about how they're going to the weapons we got from the infidels in Iraq will be deployed, which I think is Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, which if you remember, will employ.
So these are Sunni extremists who were in Afghanistan, presumably with al-Qaeda, and are now in Shia, Iran, which did, to be fair, happen a few times, but it was never a particularly comfortable arrangement for anybody involved.
And they have are getting access to, through kind of an unclear providence, the weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein had spirited out of Iraq and into, I think it was either Iran or Syria.
None of it makes any sense to anyone who has even the vaguest level of understanding of Middle Eastern politics.
But this is what's happening.
Great.
Yeah.
Awesome.
Muhammad did not.
And by great, I mean awful, awful.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Also, if Iran is on board with this sort of thing, they have chemical weapons.
Like, you don't have to have Saddams, but whatever.
You have to have Saddam have had the weapons because then it justifies the war in Iraq.
Sure, yeah.
Yeah.
Muhammad bit his lip.
Ashami saw it.
I see that you are worried, he said.
Do not fear.
Does not the Quran.
He bite his lip through a scraggly beard.
Does not the Quran say, those who have said, our Lord is Allah, and then remained on a right course, the angels will descend upon them, saying, Do not fear and do not grieve, but receive good tidings of paradise.
Again, so offensive.
Not a super relevant quote, Ben.
Just like picking something.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's like it's like literally a quote saying, like, yeah, if you're on the right course, God will make you feel good about it.
But not a particularly, I don't know.
It's not the kind of thing that you would quote to somebody in a moment like this.
I don't think.
I think it just demonstrates him not caring enough to do real research.
No, he googled a single passage from the Quran that he felt like was vaguely appropriate and threw it in there.
So, yeah.
Do, do, do.
The sound of the afternoon wesen wafted into the room.
He took a deep breath and then pulled a disposable cell phone and dialed.
A man's voice answered at the other end.
He spoke with a thick Russian accent.
Yes?
He said yes in a thick Russian accent.
Tomorrow, Ashami said, then hung up abruptly.
That's their conversation.
He turned to Mohammed.
Go, Mohammed, and Allah will go with you.
As Muhammad left, Ashami knelt on his prayer rug.
When he got up, he turned to the door and smiled.
There, standing before him, was a large American man in a military uniform.
He wore a blindfold.
Welcome, General Hawthorne, Ashami said.
Yeah, we're back to Brett Hawthorne.
Yes, yes.
Well, no, actually, we're back to Mohammed because he's sipping some tea at a cafe now.
Classy cafe.
Yeah.
Of course.
I would like to just point out just another tip to Ben.
You didn't need to say he pulled out a disposable cell phone and then had the conversation.
You say he pulled out a cell phone.
You have the conversation happen.
And then you see him throw the cell phone away.
Yeah, and you see him crush it underfoot or something.
That's a good note.
Just a good note.
To indicate to us, the reader, that maybe he hands it off to a train.
Yeah, you could have it even if you want this guy to be really cool.
You can just hold the phone out and an underlying nose to take it and destroy it immediately.
That's just the operation this guy has going.
But yeah, Ben's bad at writing.
So let's get to this next part.
Muhammad glanced nervously around Cafe Naderi as he sipped his nana tea.
It was a classy joint, and everyone wore a suit.
It was a business cafe located in the lower level of a hotel.
It wasn't the kind of place that would kick up any sort of fuss in a Western city, but in Tehran, it was a rarity.
Ben doesn't know a goddamn thing about this part of the world.
I haven't been to Iran.
I've been to places that are much poorer than Iran in the Middle East, and they have a fuckload of cafes like that.
You know why?
Because it's a huge fucking part of culture in the Middle East to sit at cafes and drink motherfucking tea.
It's an enormous thing.
They do it all the time.
They have tons of them.
They're all over the fucking place.
But no, this is one of the only nice cafes in Tehran.
A city that prides itself on its fucking tea house.
Anyway, fucking fucking.
No, no.
I don't think you understand, Robert.
They live in dirt.
They live in dirt.
Yeah, they live in dirt and filth.
Clearly, you're mistaken, Robert.
Maybe, maybe the people with the scraggly beards go to wherever you're talking about, but this is a real fancy place.
Yeah, it's the last non-Islamic cafe in the city.
It brags about that.
The last non-Islamic cafe in Tehran.
It's the last one.
The last one.
The last one.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, yeah, he's having some sort of meeting there with some guy named Andre.
I'm guessing that's the Russian.
It also had the benefit of maintaining a solidly anti-regime reputation.
Not a great thing.
I don't.
So, like, what do you think Iran is, Ben?
Like, is it so oppressive that this is the only non-Islamic cafe?
Or is it open enough that you can have a solidly anti-ri, like, a reputedly anti-regime cafe exist in the city and it'd be fine?
Yeah, exactly.
Intellectuals and writers hung out in packs and talked treason.
What do you think?
God damn it.
Be consistent about your wrongness about a place.
I don't like, no, goddammit.
He got that from watching Hamilton.
Okay, this is fucking amazing.
Intellectuals and writers hung out in packs and talked treason.
For that reason, regime informers populated the place.
It was the last location Western intelligence agencies would watch.
The last location they're going to watch is this cafe filled with people talking treason against the Iranian region.
That's the last place they're going to watch.
What do you, how, God, everything is so wrong about his conception of the fucking world.
Of just like reality and like how, like, not even, because it's not even like having specific knowledge about the region, although that's clearly a problem.
Bafflingly wrong.
If you say this thing, regardless of where it is, and then you say this other thing, they contradict each other.
You think the CIA, like, you think, okay, so let's, let's imagine, let's imagine in Ben's world, the undercover CIA operatives who exist in Tehran talking about where they should spend their resources scoping out.
Hey, there's this famous anti-regime cafe, the only non-Islamic cafe in the city.
Lots of treasonous intellectuals go there.
Probably not worth our time, right?
We shouldn't be there at all.
There are better places.
There are better places.
Yeah, that tracks.
That tracks.
Yeah.
That sounds like being spies.
Just unimportant.
Just don't use the word reason two words after you use the word treason.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Also bad.
God damn it, Ben.
So, yeah, they're meeting this cafe because nobody's going to suspect that the cafe treasonish people gather is where terrorists will gather.
Yeah.
Muhammad had complete faith in Ashami.
Ashami was the man who had taught him the emptiness of secularism, the beauty of belief.
He was a master strategist who had launched several substantial attacks on targets ranging from embassies to hotels to restaurants in America, Europe, and Israel.
He is with Allah, and I am with him, Muhammad thought.
I also enjoy that it's like country, continent, country is where this guy's attacks have been.
We don't need to specify it.
You don't say something like, he was the master strategist behind the Paris bombing of 2011 or the nightclub attack in Spain that claimed 31 lives.
We don't.
Because why would you write like a writer?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Dolph Briefcase And Villain Tropes00:14:40
So this kid's waiting for this Russian.
He's got a satchel.
What is the satchel like, though?
Like what?
It's got a shaving kit that he bought just to avoid suspicion for some reason, but he'd also tossed it immediately.
I don't know why Ben is telling us all this.
Okay, so he's got a bunch of money.
He doesn't know why either.
Yeah.
This guy, this Russian guy's late.
They're trying to have a meeting, but this Russian guy's fucking late.
Oh, oh, God.
Okay, here we go.
Had Andrei been followed by the Americans?
Had he been taken out of play by the Israelis?
What if every minute he stayed here, the Zionists were drawing closer?
He had heard the stories about the Jewish devils, about how they had blown the heads off of nuclear scientists with their headrest bombs, about how their computer specialists had stifled the Iranian nuclear program.
If they knew what he was planning, the sons of pigs and monkeys would surely take him out of play.
Using out of play again twice in the paragraph, too.
That's fun.
It's a phrase that they use a lot, too, culturally.
Sure, absolutely.
Yeah.
So, okay, I guess this guy comes in eventually.
Someone says something stupid.
The first thing the Russian says, he's surprised because the Russian's short, and the Russian says you expected Dolph Lundgren, perhaps.
And of course, Muhammad doesn't know who that is.
Also, not really sure that a lot of Russians know who Dolph Lund.
He's not like a famous guy in Russia, I don't think.
But maybe I'm wrong on that one.
I don't know much about Russian culture.
He's Swedish.
Dolph Lund Henry.
No, he played a Russian in a movie.
He played a Russian in a movie.
So a Russian would use Dolph Lundgren as his immediate go-to cultural touchstone for a tall person when talking to an Iranian.
You're like talking to an Iraqi, and you're like, oh, yeah, like the villain from True Lies or something like that.
That would actually work because they've all seen every American action movie fucking imaginable.
But yeah.
Bad example.
Point B. Bad example.
He's Swedish.
What are you talking about, Ben?
Yeah.
Unreal.
Yeah.
Nonsense.
It's not often I get to eat well in this country.
Oh, boy.
Yeah.
So the Russian says, yeah, you can't eat well in Iran, a country that famously has no cuisine.
God, he has such a fucking low opinion on amazing.
Yeah.
What?
God.
Yeah.
Okay.
So they go outside and you hail a cab, you know, a bunch of just bullshit stuff that Ben is trying to make it seem like an exciting spy thing, but is actually incredibly boring.
Oh, and then the chapter ends with nothing happening.
Nothing happening other than this guy giving him a suitcase.
That's the whole thing.
The kid gets a suitcase from this Russian.
That's the whole chapter.
That's the whole chapter.
That ends.
Wow.
Yeah.
That's just him nervous.
That's what's getting me aware.
Where are you?
Burning alive.
Yeah, no one burnt alive in this chapter.
What the fuck?
Unreal.
So we have, I'm very excited, guys.
We have just now entered.
Having finished that chapter, we have now entered part two, collapse.
Oh, my goodness.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Wait a second.
What?
Wait a second.
This is we're entering part two.
We have just entered part two, Cody.
From like a storytelling perspective, another word for that, the term might be like act two.
Yeah.
So what you're saying is act one ends with a briefcase being delivered.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that boy heading to the airport with the briefcase.
Yeah, that's a cliffhanger.
And random insults about Iranian cuisine, which is fantastic, by the way.
It's really crossing that threshold into adventure.
It's deeply frustrating.
Also, part one is before.
Part two is collapse.
Uh-oh.
Great words to choose from.
That's so bad.
Oh, my God.
Those don't match at all.
Two and a half episodes have been us getting through before.
And now chapter one after collapse is, and you're all going to be excited for this.
Bret Hawthorne.
Oh, shit.
Wow.
Fuck yeah.
Finally.
Fuck yeah.
We're back to Brett Huggins.
Are we doing that today or is that going to be next?
I feel like we've got a, if we've got the time, we've got to roll through a little bit of a little bit of Brett H beat.
I feel right.
He's our protagonist.
Yeah.
And because Ben is such a good writer, he's been like teasing.
It's like, pretty soon, we're going to get a second chapter with our main character.
I bet he'll bite the empty magazine of his gun again.
Tomorrow.
The word hung in the air for a moment.
Spoken in Arabic, not meant for his ears.
Brett was sure of that.
Oh, God.
All three separate sentences.
He couldn't see a thing.
Dash, the blindfold over his eyes prevented him from seeing the room.
But the next words confirmed Brett's worst fears.
He recognized the voice.
God, that's a bad sentence.
That's really poorly put together.
But the next words confirmed Brett's worst fears.
Semicolon, he recognized the voice.
Oh, fucking horrible.
Oh, that's so bad.
You're mentioning the words, but it's the voice that the thing that.
Oh.
Yeah.
God damn it, Ben.
How can you be this bad at writing?
How can you be this bad at writing?
It's like really literally your job.
It's obviously bad.
Like, it's not even like you read, like, sometimes you read a book and you're like, well, that's mediocre.
That's nothing special.
This is just bad.
It's one thing.
Like, it's like, it's one thing to write a book and it'd be like, oh, well, yeah, you know, the story structure was kind of a mess.
The character development wasn't super fluid.
Like, you know, that's just a thing.
It's hard to write books.
Anyone who's going, who tries to is going to try to write fiction, you're going to have books where it's like, okay, yeah, you know, your character development wasn't great.
Or like, you know, the pacing wasn't, you know, was off here, off here.
But like, this is just the very basic technical facts of how he writes sentences are so bad.
Yeah, it's like this bizarre, like disjointed, like, like, nothing matches up.
Subjects don't match up.
And like, it's unclear.
Like, it's, it's, like, vaguely clear, like, what the intention is, but if you take a second, you're like, well, that doesn't make any sense, bro.
If, if a, if a junior, if I were teaching, like, a, a, a creative writing class for junior high school kids and someone turned this in, um, I would, I would have a conversation.
I would have to sit down with them and talk about some things.
Right.
Like, I was going to say, like, it's not like a, it's not like a shame thing, but it's like, this actually, okay, we're going to.
So, like, there's some structural things that need to be altered here about the way you write.
If I were worried about like embarrassing the student in front of the other students, I'd be like, this is actually a good example of a sentence we should look at.
And, like, what's wrong with this sentence?
And you'd be like, why isn't this doing the job this sentence needs to do?
Every sentence needs to do a job.
Let's look at why this one isn't functioning.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And you can kind of do that with every other sentence.
You can do that with every single sentence in this book.
Yeah.
Welcome, General Hawthorne, said Ibraham Ashami in a clipped accent.
It's a clipped accent, bitch.
What?
What is it?
What's a wrong?
God damn it.
Yeah.
Brett's captors forced him to his knees.
He felt them hit.
God damn it.
Sentence one, Brett's captors forced him to his knees, period.
Sentence two, he felt them hit stone.
What?
His captors?
His been, god damn it.
That is.
Oh, man.
Then he felt a sweaty hand remove the blindfold.
That was a sentence.
And that was a sentence.
That's a sentence.
I know what's wrong.
That's a great sentence, but a functional sentence.
Yeah.
Before him stood the world's most well-known terrorist since Osama bin Laden.
Period.
Smiling.
That's the next sentence after that.
It's just smiling.
God.
Then put, oh my God.
Put the palanuk down.
Like, that's all I can think about when he does shit like that.
I'm like, God.
I think if Chuck Palanuk listened to this episode, like, he would feel compelled to correct some things in the world.
Yeah, like, these were verbs, bud.
Yeah.
I hope you weren't too mistreated on your journey here, Ashami said, turning his back to him.
We wouldn't want a famous war hero victimized by, how did you put it in your interviews?
Barbarians?
Brett kept his mouth shed.
He knew how this would go, and he knew that the taunting presaged something far more frightening.
Instead of listening to Ashami's monologue, Brett quietly scanned the room for tools, anything he could use.
He almost didn't notice when Ashami turned back around, thrust his face just inches from his own.
God damn it, that's a bad sentence.
He almost didn't notice when Ashami turned back around, thrust his face just inches from his own.
Jesus Christ.
Brett could smell.
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
Brett could smell his breath, the faint vestiges of Chello Koresh still on it.
General Hawthorne, Ashami said, I know you and that you are a resourceful man.
I also know that your country is a paper tiger and that your president is a weakling.
Weaklings watch as the world burns around them, thinking they are safe because they have a mirror and they are lost in the reflection.
What the fuck is that shit?
That's fucking nonsense, Ben.
That is fucking nonsense.
Which one of you just snorted so adorable?
I did.
I'm sorry.
I love it.
I think this chapter might kill Cody.
I don't know that he's going to make it out of this.
I just said Katie a text.
I was like, I think this is the happiest I've seen Cody and Robert in like a month.
I know.
This is really cleansing my soul a bit.
It's so hard to have a profound thought and to like articulate it in an artful way.
I love you guys so much.
This is so great.
This is why your country will lose.
Finally, Brett spoke.
America doesn't lose.
We just convince ourselves not to win.
You're the ones who will lose.
We don't have to tape beheadings to frighten people into joining us.
Quite a pair.
A lot of things being expressed there, Ben.
Oh my God.
Ashami, to Brett's surprise, laughed uproariously, clapped his hands in delight.
That was one sentence.
Ashami to Brett's surprise.
Ashami, comma, to Brett's surprise, laughed uproariously, comma, clapped his hands in delight.
Period.
Fucking hell.
Oh, you Americans, you don't understand at all.
You're delightfully out of touch.
I mean, delightfully until you start dropping incendiaries on our children.
You spend your lives fat and happy, eating at McDonald's, imagining yourself superior because you have clean shopping malls and manicured front lawns.
Have you ever been to a shopping mall in this part of the anyway?
But while you sleep, but while you sleep, while you watch your reality television, your children abandon you.
It's just like you Americans and your food and your streets.
You Americans have streets and we don't.
Yeah.
Yeah, your children abandon you no matter how many patriot missiles you send against us.
Yada yada yada.
You see, we offer something you do not.
A reason to die.
We need not frighten anyone.
You do the frightening because you see, people are not frightened to die or to be killed down deep.
Down deep, they are afraid of dying without that death meaning anything.
They are afraid that they will die and that a life of playing Xbox and watching your American movies and eating your American food and worshiping themselves will end in the ground and their lives forgotten.
And of course they are right.
Their lives are meaningless.
Brett scoffed.
And yours, I suppose, are meaningful, slaughtering women and children.
Ashami grabbed Brett by his face, squeezing his jaw until it hurt.
Brett clinched his teeth and stared into his eyes.
Oh my god, Ben.
It's a lot of jostling.
Brett clenched his teeth, referring to Brett's teeth, and stared into his eyes, referring to Ashami's eyes.
God damn it, Ben.
Yeah, okay.
Thank you.
God damn it.
It's sort of like it washes over you and you're like, well, surely it'll make sense.
Fine.
But like, ah.
We will do anything for Allah.
That is our strength and your weakness.
Brett whispered, there, you're wrong.
You don't know me and you don't know my countrymen.
We live for something.
We live to kill bastards like you.
We live to kill.
Yeah, that's what makes America great is murdering strangers in the desert.
Yeah, Ben gets it.
I mean, for some people, yeah, I guess it is.
No, he's nailing it.
Like, it's just amazing.
He's like, Yeah, this is the way it is, and it's actually good, actually.
Yeah, because the guy, the bad guy is saying, like, you live for nothing.
Like, by killing you, we live for something.
And Brett says, That's not true.
We live for killing you.
And that's so good.
Oh, God.
It's like he can't.
He will never be able to realize what he just did.
In the hands of like a minimally competent author, you could have this be trying to say something where it's like, oh, both of these men are the same kind of man who feels like you are used to it.
A paragraph earlier.
Yeah.
Like, you're, you're already evoking this idea, but he doesn't even know that he's doing it.
Like, yeah, you have like, things are complicated.
I want like a minimally competent writer.
Not even a good writer.
Like, I don't know.
Yeah, just a writer who had like a second thought.
Yeah.
A single additional thought.
Just like, and that thought would be like, what if I wanted to try to make this mildly interesting?
Just like the bare minimum of an interesting scene.
Ah, God.
I like it.
It's good.
So the Ashami sends General Hawthorne away, turns to his goons and has him taken to a cell.
And like through a crack in the window, Brett sees a tower.
And it lets him know exactly where he is in Tehran.
Because of that dirty scene briefly, I recognize the dirty tower from my dirty map that I got.
The filthy, filthy tower.
The scum tower.
Next to the dirty scum tower at Mud Street.
God damn it.
Yusuf Ali And The Dirty Tower00:10:08
They came for him in the middle of the night, the better to keep him off balance.
He'd been trained for such techniques, but too long ago to matter.
And he'd awoken groggy, head-pounding, nauseated by the casual beating handed out to him by one of Ashami's lackeys.
Quite a sentence there, Ben.
No marks to the face, of course.
They wanted their victims looking fresh and clean before they saw it off their heads.
But the big bearded kid had worked his torso over pretty well and ground the bones of his arm against one another to boot.
Yusuf, he'd heard one of the others call him.
He wouldn't forget that anytime soon.
Every time Yusuf had balled up his fist and driven it into his midsection, Brett had again.
Every time Yusuf balled up his fist, Yusuf's fist, and driven it into his midsection, Brett's midsection, like, God damn it.
It's wild.
It's so frustrating to like try to also, like, I love the idea.
Like, we make sure they're nice and clean to remind us of what we hate.
Yeah, Ben, a man who's clearly watched, again, a single video of one of these executions.
Like, they'd taken his uniform from him, forced him into an orange jump suit, the uniform of their victims.
When he'd gone to the bucket that served as a toilet, he'd noticed his urine had turned red, like Ali, he thought to himself, after the thriller.
But Ali had survived that.
Talking about fucking Muhammad Ali, I guess?
Pissing blood?
Okay.
It hasn't been established that Brett's a big Muhammad Ali fan.
I don't think that, but I think that's just coming out of nowhere, but okay.
This is the literary device that's happening.
Yeah.
Because Ben's a litterer.
Yeah.
So, Brett's plans not to survive.
He'd formed a plan after seeing the Azadi Tower, gauging the distance from it, realizing that the map that he got earlier had.
I don't know.
So he's, I don't, I don't really follow Ben's plan here.
But it seems like he blinked a message to the boys in intelligence when he did his video.
And he's hoping that, Jesus Christ.
He hoped that the boys in intelligence picked up on the message that he'd be sending.
So he's planning to, as he's being executed, blink out the coordinates of where this terrorist's headquarters are in Tehran so that it can be bombed.
Tower.
Yeah.
Based off.
I see the tower.
I know.
Therefore, I know where I am in relation to the city.
I memorized in my head what the geographical coordinates are, and I can now blink them.
Yes.
Yes.
I love stories.
Yes.
He just hoped that the boys and intelligence picked up on the message he'd be sending, and he prayed that the film editor or whatever cave dweller familiar with Windows Movie Maker you'd be using for this particular production didn't chop up the film too badly.
Fucking hell, Ben.
Whatever fucking dirty ass MS paint fucking like God.
Oh God.
So yeah, they joke, the terrorist joke is they kick him away.
If you can drag him down a hallway.
Do you premiere?
Whatever stink pit living hell monsters tried to edit this.
Oh, God.
So they tell Brett that he's going to be in a movie now, and Brett muttered through gritted teeth, Fuck you and your mother.
Yusuf smiled.
Brett smiled back.
Also, your goat, he added.
God damn it, Ben.
The door at the end of the hallway swung open.
Waiting before a green flag sat Ashami, his face bared.
Normally in these videos, Brett knew the terrorists like to swatch their faces in black scarves to prevent identification.
For the Jihad video of a major American general, Ashami wanted to take personal credit.
Yusuf and his buddy deposited Brett next to Ashami on his knees.
General, said Ashami, looking down at Brett, I hope your accommodations were not too primitive.
I must say, you look somewhat the worse for wear.
No, said Brett, glancing at Yussef.
Nothing I couldn't handle.
Ah, ever the tough American.
Well, the good news is that your suffering will not last much longer.
Yours either, I bet, said Brett.
But I will not suffer, Ashami said placidly.
Remember, I serve Allah, and no matter what happens, he will be with me.
I only hope he's with all the different pieces of you after we nail your ass with a hellfire missile.
Any plans I don't know about, General?
Brett smiled back.
Maybe, maybe not.
You'll find out soon enough.
Yeah, they get down to the business of killing Brett Hawthorne.
Oh, boy, testicles come up here.
Let's see what happened here.
Let me be perfectly clear.
You will cooperate.
If you say anything we don't wish you to say, I will personally cut off your testicles.
If you do anything we do not wish you to do, I will cut off your testicles, and then I will slash your throat after letting you bleed.
He says testicles twice in one paragraph.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Because this guy's big into cutting testicles off of people.
He could have said them.
Like, this is one of those situations where he could have used the nonspecific.
Like, the second time, I cut them off.
Like, it's simple stuff.
So they film it, and I guess they're not killing him.
Yeah, so that's nice.
They take him back to his cell.
And so, yeah, he gets down on his knees.
He does something he hasn't done for years.
He gets down on his knees and prays.
Hell yeah.
Jesus.
Dear Lord, he whispered to the darkness, thick with the stench of feces and urine, oppressive with the smell of sweat.
You know I haven't seen it.
All stuff that he's saying.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's just Brett Hawthorne has been shitting so much in his cell that he can't stand it.
I love.
I can't.
Okay.
Yeah.
So it's good.
It smells good stuff.
The smell of shit and piss is overwhelming.
Absolutely overwhelming.
But then what does he say the second time?
Brett's been in there for a day, by the way.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, like, I can't.
I just can't breathe with all my piles or days worth of piss and shit.
But like, then the second thing he says is like the oppressive sweat.
Wait, you're worried about the sweat?
You mentioned the piss and the shit, but like the sweat is the thing that is really oppressive.
That's the stench.
Okay, so Brett Hawthorne starts to pray.
I know I haven't spoken with you for a while, but I need you now.
I may never forgive you for what you did to my Ellen, why you took our baby from us.
They say you have a logic all your own, and I reckon that's the case, since I sure as hell can't understand you or the things you do.
I know I've tried to do the right thing as I see it, and I haven't broken too many of the lessons I learned in Sunday school.
And you know better than anybody that I've never been one for prayer.
I always thought that some people treat you like a gumball machine.
Like if they pray just the right way and say just the right things, that you'll give them what they want.
And then when this whole world is about something bigger than what any of us want, it's about what you want.
And I do hope that I've done at least a few things the way you want them.
Really, trying to get my head around this here is like, you're like, wrap it up.
You do bad things.
Also, it's dumb when people pray to you about their own personal stuff because clearly what matters is what you, the guy that I've just said, I don't understand why you're so mean, wants.
I don't know.
But that said, that's my issues with Christianity.
I mean, again, it's just like he's just like typing so he can like, I'll get to a profound thought, surely.
Yeah.
I'm just going to say that.
And now I'm not praying for myself.
I'm praying for Ellen.
Because after all this, she's going to be alone, Lord.
And I just want her to be happy.
You took her children away from her.
Maybe I took myself away from her.
But however, it worked out.
Now she'll be on her own.
Please let her find someone else.
Please let her be happy for once in her life.
Please let my sweetheart go on with her life.
Let her understand what I've done and why I've done it.
Thank you, Lord, in advance.
Amen.
Brett closed his eyes and dropped into an uneasy sleep.
And that is the end of the chapter.
Wow.
Thank God.
Oh, God damn.
That's so horrible.
So unpleasant.
Unbelievable.
Nauseous.
Shocking.
Kept going.
Excruciating prayer, Brett.
My painful, painful prose.
I don't think I've ever been put in such physical pain as a result of the writing that somebody has, that I have read.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And briefly for a second there, kid you not, my brain went, Robert, why are you doing this to us?
That's the only reasonable feeling when you read Ben Shapiro's work for even a moment.
God.
Oh, it was fun, though.
We had fun.
We did.
We had a good time.
We love books, don't we?
And we've got so much more of this book left to look forward to.
Yeah, we're barely in act two.
Amount of it.
I can't wait to see what collapses.
Yeah.
And then part three.
Maybe there's a part four even, you know.
If we're lucky.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think we're going to have to.
We're going to have to go through all this this entire book.
Yeah, we are committed now.
You're right that we do have to.
We're going to have to go through it readily.
We're going to have to readily go through this book.
Readily.
I'm going to have to absorb more of it with my ears.
And I feel fundamentally changed as a human being.
You know, I was feeling kind of broken down from all of the relentless police violence getting maced in the face directly last night.
It wasn't super fun.
It's been tough.
And I feel rejuvenated in a way that I didn't know was possible.
It looks like life has been breathed back into you.
It does.
You've got that glow, that yellow glow in your eye that you get it.
Twitter Instagram And Relentless Violence00:02:40
Only comes from trying to diagram a sentence and figure out what the Ben Shapiro meant when he was writing it.
So uh, do you guys want to plug your plugables?
Yeah, check out our show together Worst Year ever and check out and check out uh Cody, Katie's podcast EVEN MORE NEWS.
Yeah, it's on most fridays right right, Katie Fridays.
Yep, that's right fridays.
And our youtube show comes out sometimes.
Sometimes it's called SOME MORE NEWS.
Um, we've got a patreon.
You google our names.
We're on the internet twitter, wise Patreon, more like Yatreon, and that was really good.
You can follow, you can?
You guys can follow Katie and Cody on the twitter and instagram at dark dr, Mr Cody, and at Katie Stole.
You can follow this podcast at Bastards POD on twitter and instagram.
You can follow Robert at I Write, okay, we have a TEA Public store where we have new.
Uh, what is it?
What is the new?
The new?
The new?
Uh merch, we have Robert.
What did we get it to say?
Oh uh, it's uh, it's a, it's a face mask that says FDA, guaranteed to prevent all diseases.
Um, so that is, that is a legal guarantee that the FDA will back a hundred percent.
Um, and if they don't, that's amazing, they can attack me in my mountaintop compound with uh firebombs from the sky and uh yeah, that's amazing, you can also get it as as a sure drug or uh, whatever they sell.
So if youbsite, uh get the shirt and you go to, like the grocery store and someone's like you can't come in here without a mask, like well, look at my shirt, it's FDA approved, could I have this with?
If it weren't FDA approved no, they would raid the mountaintop compound of whoever produced this and burned 70 something children to death in his base.
Getting very Alex Jones.
Um yeah anyways, that's the episode.
That is the episode.
Wash your hands earners, what's up?
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How much away Wanda?
Right now, I'm about 130.
I'm at 183.
We should race.
No, I want to lead here with my original hips.
On the podcast, The Matchup with Aaliyah, I pair prominent female athletes with unexpected guests.
On a recent episode, I sat down with undisputed boxing champ Clarissa Shields and comedian Wanda Sykes to talk about Wanda's new movie, Undercard, The Art of Trash Talk, and what it really means to be ladylike.
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Readers, Katie's finalists, Publicists, we have an incredible new episode this week for you guys.
We have our girl Hillary Duff in here, and we can't wait for you to hear this episode.
They put on Lizzie McGuire 2 a.m. video on demand.
This guy's 2 a.m.
2 a.m.
Whatever time it is.
Lizzie McGuire and I'm like wild bats.
It was like a first closet moment for me where I was like, you're like, I don't feel like she's hot like the rest of them.
No, no, no.
I was like, she's beautiful, but I'm appreciating her in a different way than these boys are.
I'm not like...
Listen to Las Co Triestas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
You know the famous author Roll Dahl.
He thought up Willy Wonka and the BFG.
But did you know he was a spy?
Neither did I. You can hear all about his wildlife story in the podcast, The Secret World of Roald Dahl.
All episodes are out now.
Was this before he wrote his stories?
It must have been.
What?
Okay, I don't think that's true.
I'm telling you, I was a spy.
Binge all 10 episodes of The Secret World of Roald Dahl now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.